O'NIELL: Old Thoughts for a New Year

I am an inveterate reader of books of quotations. At my daughter’s house in Sacramento, I found an old paperback book of quotations, the kind of pocketbook edition I used to browse when I was a teenager. Like me, that old book was showing signs of wear. It was yellowed at the edges of its pages, and the cheap pulp paper was tinder dry, but there were quotes in that book that don’t turn up in collections anymore. Time marches on. Which is the thought for the day on this recollection of 2012.

The older compilations of great thoughts have lots of quotes that have dropped away as older thinkers make room for newer ones. Woody Allen’s quips edge out long dead English poets, Bob Dylan lyrics take over space once given to German philosophers or Greek playwrights. Dorothy Parker or Nora Ephron witticisms push aside 17th century Puritan preachers. But whether the quotes are old or new, I like turning them over in my mind, these nuggets in the stream of consciousness, some glittering, others somewhat dull, but all holding the promise of lighting up a corner of my brain. I spent some idle moments flipping through that old book, desiccated by the decades, and I came across a few bon mots worth sharing, insights like this one from George Bowen: “The rain it raineth on the just/And also on the unjust fella;/But chiefly on the just, because/The unjust steals the just's umbrella.”

Bowen is long forgotten, but his observation is bleakly funny, and still true.

I also found a quote by General Phil Sheridan that seemed worth resurrecting from the tomb of time. “If I owned Texas and Hell,” Sheridan said, “I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.” I liked that old quote, especially in view of the fact that a whole bunch of Texans petitioned to secede from the union after President Barack Obama won a second term. Considering how far down the chain Texas ranks in wages, working conditions, and educational quality, and how high up the ladder it is in ignorance and really stupid politicians, Sheridan’s assessment of the place still seemed timely.

Other quotes that hit a contemporary target included this ancient observation from The Babylonian Talmud: “This is the punishment of a liar,” that old text proclaimed. “He is not believed even when he speaks the truth.” I don’t know who could read that quote without thinking of Mitt Romney and his outrageous pattern of lies. The man contradicted himself so often, told lies about his past, about his positions, about a hundred and one things, that it was impossible to sort out what he believed from what he didn’t. There must have been times he was telling the truth, but he lied so often that it was impossible to tell when he was telling the truth. And he was punished by defeat, though he explained his losses with yet another lie, the one he wanted to believe about how Obama bought the election by giving stuff to undeserving people solely to get their votes.

Those lies and evasions Romney engaged in so blatantly, in a campaign that refused to be bound by “fact checkers,” seemed based on the idea that winning was the only principle worth following. Adolf Hitler expressed a similar view in his book, “Mein Kampf,” when he wrote: “Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.” Though Romney doesn’t bear comparison to the Nazis, in his business practices and his election campaign, he did seem to operate on that principle. Whether he was buying companies, sinking them into debt, then liquidating them in pursuit of profits, or telling any lie that would please whatever audience he happened to be talking to at the time, Romney personified the kind of man who can justify most anything he says or does so long as it’s in the interest of achieving success, as he defines it. At year’s end, I am inexpressibly grateful that we did not elect such a man to lead this country into such a worrisome future.

The future is always worrisome because there are always those who want to inflict their version of the truth on everyone else, book burners like Hitler or like Caliph Omar, some 1,500 years before Hitler, who advised his followers to: “Burn the libraries, for their value is in this one book.” In the case of Omar, the book was the Quran, but there are always book burning zealots who hold their one book above all the rest, whether that book is Mein Kampf, the Quran, The Book of Mormon, or the Bible.

Wherever the new year takes us, we will take the past with us as we go. Hitler, Omar, Tomas de Torquemada, and Joseph Stalin all tag along, and we forget them at our peril. But it’s a very big and very mixed bag we drag behind, also containing memories of those we loved and lost, the lessons we learned, the emotions we felt, the things we’ve seen and done, and the thoughts of people long gone, people like us who struggled to make sense of things. “The best thing about the future,” Abe Lincoln sagely observed, “is that it comes one day at a time.” And, one day at a time, we can handle it. Here’s to happy days in the coming year.